When the great California Gold Rush was announced in 1849, and single Chinese men began crossing the Pacific to The Golden Mountain—which was their generic name for the gold fields — an immigration pattern was established. In hopes of making a pile and returning to China as rich men, they endured all kinds of hardships and frequent insults from the hated white devils who let them do their laundry.
So, when the big four — Governor Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Chas. Crocker — decided to build their Central Pacific section of the Transcontinental Railway, from West to East, meeting the Union Pacific, building East to West, work-starved Chinese men seemed an excellent source of very cheap labor. They also enlisted the Irish, but multi-award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang is not celebrating their contribution to driving the golden spike at Promontory, Utah in 1869. Instead, he focuses on an adept of the Peking Opera and an eager young Chinese who wants to learn the moves as well, both of them helping blast through the unforgiving rock of the Donner Summit in the High Sierras.
In a stark setting of abstract geometric rock forms, with subtly changing light, Lone (Yuekun Wu) and Ma (Ruy Iskandar) bond through the harsh discipline of the traditional movements of Chinese opera. Lone was sold by his Parents — when he was only a small boy — to train for the Peking Opera. But, faking fatal illness, his mother calls him home, only to send him off to the Golden Mountain. He won’t be running a Chinese laundry, though, as so many “Chinamen” then did in California. No, he’ll be working on the Railroad.
Many Chinese employed and exploited by The Big Four never returned home; they died on the mountain tops, tunneling through the Sierra Summits.
The Transformative Experience of Lone and Ma — dancing on the mountain top — is wonderfully evoked by Wu and Iskandar, surely ensured by director May Adrales, with the aid of designers Mimi Lien (set), Jennifer Moeller (costumes) and Jiyoun Chang (lighting).
